Automatic content recognition technology used by Smart TVs works as a kind of “visual Shazam” — and allows them to create a detailed profile of users, which is sent to specific servers.
A team of researchers from the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), in collaboration with University College London (England) and the University of California at Davis (USA), discovered that Smart TV send data display for your servers.
This collection allows brands to create a detailed profile of users and adapt ads to their consumption habits, reveals the , recently published in Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference.
The research revealed that this technology takes screen or audio captures to identify the content shown on the screen, using Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology.
This information is periodically sent to servers specific, even when the TV is used as an external monitor or connected to a laptop.
“The ACR works as a kind of Shazam visualcapturing images or audio to create a viewer profile based on their content consumption habits”, explains Patricia Callejoprofessor at the Department of Telematics Engineering at UC3M and co-author of short-paper.
“In this way, technology allows manufacturers’ platforms to create accurate profiles of your users, just like on the internet“, adds the researcher, in one from UC3M.
“In any case, this screening, regardless of the mode of use, raises serious privacy concernsespecially when the television is used only as a monitor”, concludes Patricia Callejo.
The results of the study, presented in November at the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), highlight the regularity with which these captures are transmitted to the servers of brands analyzed: Samsung and LG.
The data shows that Samsung televisions sent this information to every minutewhile LG devices did so every 15 seconds.
“That gives us an idea of the intensity of monitoring and shows that Smart TV platforms collect large volumes of data about users, regardless of how they consume content – whether through traditional TV or devices connected via HDMI, such as notebooks or game consoles”, highlights Callejo.
To test the ability of televisions to block ACR tracking, the research team experimented different privacy settings the Smart TV.
The results showed that, although it is possible to block voluntarily transmitting this data to servers, default setting enables ACR automatically.
“The problem is that not all users are aware of this“, adds Callejo, who considers this a worrying factor, due to the lack of transparency in the initial configurations.
“Furthermore, many users don’t know how to change these settings, which results in these devices functioning as standard mechanisms for tracking your activities”, notes the Spanish researcher.
